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Chapter 27 - Harmony is your reality
the trees. We are spread all over. To experience it as reality will transform your whole approach towards life, will transform your every act, will transform your very being.
You will become full of love; you will become full of reverence for life. You will become for the first time, according to me, truly religious -- not a Christian, not a Hindu, not a Mohammedan, but truly, purely religious.
The word religion is beautiful. It comes from a root which means bringing together those who have fallen apart in their ignorance; bringing them together, waking them up so that they can see they are not separate.
Then you cannot hurt even a tree. Then your compassion and your love will be just spontaneous -- not cultivated, not something of a discipline. If love is a discipline, it is false. If nonviolence is cultivated, it is false. If compassion is nurtured, it is false. But if they come spontaneously without any effort of your own, then they have a reality so deep, so exquisite...
In the name of religion, so much crime has been done in the past. More people have been killed by religious people than by anybody else. Certainly all these religions have been fake, pseudo.
The authentic religion has to be born.
Once H.G. Wells was asked, when he had published his history of the world -- a tremendous work -- "What do you think about civilization?"
And H.G. Wells said, "It is a good idea, but somebody should do something about it to bring it into existence."
Up to now we have not been civilized, not cultured, not religious. In the name of civilization, in the name of culture, in the name of religion we have been doing all kinds of barbarous acts -- primitive, subhuman, animalistic. And sometimes we have passed even beyond the animals: no animals eats its own species, no animal is a cannibal, except man.
And you will be thinking that only in Africa a few people eat human flesh. It is not so simple to throw the responsibility on small tribes in Africa.
Just a few days ago, in Palestine, people asked the government -- because so many people are dying from hunger and starvation -- "Can we eat human flesh? Of course, of dead people
-- those who have died of starvation at least can help others to survive a little longer. And the government of Palestine has accepted the idea that it is better to eat human flesh than to die.
The population is growing so fast in the world that it is not just a guess that by the end of this century, millions of people will be eating human flesh. No animal goes that low. He will die hungry, but he will not eat any animal of his own species.
Man has fallen far away from reality. He has to be awakened to the truth that we are all one. And it is not a hypothesis; it is the experience of all the meditators, without exception, down the ages, that the whole existence is one organic unity.
So don't mistake a beautiful experience as a dream. To call it a dream cancels its reality.
Dreams have to be made real, not reality changed into dreams.
An old man of eighty-two went to a sperm bank to make a deposit.
"Are you sure," asked the woman at the reception desk, "that you want to do this?"
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 275
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